Adaptation Deviation

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When a work is adapted (whether to another medium, another culture/demographic, or both), it's a safe bet that something from the original work will be changed in the process. Maybe characters are added, combined, or omitted; maybe someone lives who originally died or vice versa, or maybe the whole thing is set in a completely different city/country/planet. The reasons for these changes can be as varied as the changes themselves, ranging from Artistic Vision to Executive Meddling to the constraints of the medium. Whatever they may be, expect cries of "That's not right at all!" from rabid fans of the original whenever these crop up. Accumulating enough of these may result in Adaptation Decay, at which point the adaptation starts to lose its resemblance to the original altogether.

Please note that faithful adaptations can exist, or at least adaptations that don't directly contradict the source material in any way (e.g., by using Happily Ever Before on a work with a Downer Ending). Also, change is not necessarily a bad thing, and can make a work more accessible to other people or even iron out the kinks in the original work (such as an Adaptation Distillation, which seeks to make a more expansive/convoluted work easier to grasp).

Disneyfication: The adaptation is Lighter and Softer than its source work, with darker plot elements removed and some light-hearted comedy and/or musical elements added, to make it more suitable for younger audiences.

In the Bokurano manga, Waku was a Chick Magnet. The anime changes it so that the only girls who came to his soccer games were the cheerleaders.

The ending to the Wandering Son anime implies Takatsuki and Nitori will "grow out" of their gender dysphoria. The manga version of the ending scene is considerably less optimistic and Nitori still identifies as a girl even when she finishes high school. Takatsuki did stop being male identified though.

At the end of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Ginji's Rescue Team, Ginji wakes up in his house as a human after his adventure ends. In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team, the protagonist stays a Pokemon.

Art

Michelangelo's painting of Haman's death on the Sistine Chapel ceiling doesn't show him being hanged on his own gallows like in the Book of Esther, but instead shows the genocidal villain being crucified. This may have come about because the Latin Bible which Michelangelo would be familiar with describes the gallows as a "crux," although other parts of the text make it clear he was hanged. The scene is described similarly by Dante in The Divine Comedy.

Comic Books

Superman: The Movie gave Krypton a crystal motif, and also invented the idea of Superman's S being a family coat of arms. Before that, it really was an S.

The 1980s Supergirl movie changed Argo from surviving on a chunk of Krypton to surviving in another dimension.

One of the X-Men movies, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, infamously depicted Deadpool as not having a mouth. This is not a minor change, either, as one of Deadpool's nicknames in comics is "the merc with the mouth"note Granted, he was explicitly talkative and mouthy in the film before the removal of his mouth, which was an in-universe attempt by his superiors to finally shut him up .

Film

The most common complaint fans of It's a Wonderful Life have with the famous, beloved, classic film is the Values Dissonance-laden fate of George's wife. When George wishes he was never born, his wife Mary's alternate fate without him in her life is to be an Old Maid working at the library, which the film depicts as an unbearable, unspeakably awful situation, which George takes even worse than his brother's death and other much more terrible changes. Compare her fate in the original short story "The Greatest Gift," where she ended up married to an abusive alcoholic — something viewers in any decade would find horrifyingly tragic.

Justice League (2017) features a cameo by Crispus Allen—and in an inversion of his comics' counterpart being bald with a goatee, he's depicted with a hair full of hair and clean-shaven. Additionally, like in Gotham he's shown not to wear glasses.

Literature

In The Secret Garden, Colin's father discovers him just as he's winning a footrace with Mary. The 1993 film adaptation changes this to a game of blind man's bluff, resulting in a somewhat more emotional moment.

Web Comic

While not a strict adaptation, Looking for Group got its start as a parody of World of Warcraft. The name comes from the MMO chat term for a player forming a party to tackle a difficult quest, and each of the original four main characters corresponded to one of the Horde races in the game. But as the series went on, it drew less and less inspiration from Warcraft and eventually just became a comedic fantasy series. We can pinpoint the exact moment the series stopped being a WoW parody: when the team encountered a group of trolls (including recurring character Tim) who looked nothing like Benny, whose appearance is based on the trolls from the game but her background turned out to be completely different.

Community

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